The other day over the weekend I decided to finally pull those 500 Lire coins I'd ordered out and look at them to see if I'd gotten anything good / promising. I'd been wanting to look at these for a while knowing it would be kind of shot-in-the-dark and I might have something good or I might have gotten nothing. I thought I'd sit down and look while Shandy napped with Sam and Ben watched TV.

But, somewhat to my surprise, Ben took notice and wanted to look at them with me and was asking if these were my gold coins and if they were "real gold." I told him, "No. They're an alloy that looks like gold in the middle." He saw a 200L in the same page and asked if that was gold - nope. Brass alloy. So since he seemed really interested in seeing the real gold ones I went and I got out the actual gold ones, which he claimed he thought were really cool. I showed him the 2016 and 2019 for their birthyears, which he seemed to think were neat, but when I asked if he thought there was one or two that were more interesting he couldn't / wouldn't pick one and he didn't want to ask about them even though I offered to talk about any of them he wanted.

He, of course, wanted one - he'd wanted a 500L coin before the gold ones came out and I'd let him have one that he picked from an old batch. That 500L coin is now on the couch or between the cushions or something. I was just like, "No. You're going to be a lot older before I let you have something like this. " "How old?" "Like at least 18." "No! Like 8 or 9!" "Not happening."

You can see the 500L he picked in his hands, still in his soccer jersey from the game that morning.

He made some comment about how the gold coins could "make a dollar" which makes me pretty sure he has no clue just how expensive those are and that 1 of those coins is about 2 years of his allowance. Of course, one of the first things he did was count to see how many there were - he can count to 100, as he finishes his Kindergarten year.

As you might imagine, I didn't get to actually look at the 500L coins well, or for very long. At the end of nap time I was feeling pretty disappointed with what I had seen because a few very nice ones I'd seen where for dates we already had well covered and I'd seen some that didn't look good at all. And I didn't get to look at these again for 2 more days, looking at them at night using a flash light to read the tiny little dates on them.

However, when I finally did get to look at them I felt a bit better about the outcome. We'd gotten 25 coins when I'd been expecting 24 - but one of those was a 1994 that was one of the circulating commemorative years that doesn't fit into the registry set I'm building. From the remaining 24 there was only 1 1987 and 2 1983s, and I don't think any of those are nicer than the 1983 and 1987 I got from the franklin mint sets. However, there were 3 1986-dated coins, and a couple of those actually look pretty nice. So that might be the big score from the purchase / lot.

I also got in those 2003, $10 Zimbabwe coins. I do think they are nicer than the AU58 I have but I think the seller calling them Gem Uncirc was a bit of a stretch. I think MS63 is more likely. I still might submit one with the 500L coins though just to try to improve that AU58.

I got a chance to take images of the new 500L coins recently. Shandy also noticed and pointed out that, while the pictures of the old coins are nice and while the new pictures of the new coins are nice, the color balance on the images / color tint doesn't quite match, and I'm not sure how to fix that. I think to get a perfectly consistent set of images that I'm happy with I'm going to have to just re-shoot the whole group at the same time just because I'm not that good at perfectly matching things up between shoots and the human eye can pick out some small and subtle things when they're right next to each other. This is the approach I've taken with the 10G set - shooting them all again all at once - and this is probably the approach I'll take with the Zimbabwe coins, But I don't want to go that route with the 500L set just yet because if I do that I'd like to wait to send in and get back these next 2-3 coins (1983, 1986, 1987) and have the set a little more complete for that kind of effort.

I would not have expected that it would be a month after getting the coins back and I wouldn't have taken shots of all the New Zimbabwe coins yet or popped them into that new case yet, but life has just been a little busy lately, including at work, and Sam and Ben have been home sick a lot lately - usually one and then the other and then the other again.